Florian Wenzel
@flopunktwe
Best of the week 44 at #nomadict 2022
Photography and traveling changed my life. I met my closest friends through it. And it’s kinda my way of isolating myself from the stress of daily life. Not that I want to run away from something, but sometimes everything is simply too much. For me being on the road with beloved people always feels like recharging my inner battery. Plus, I get to create memories I will never forget.
In August 2018 we did a hike in Graubünden, Switzerland. The weather forecast wasn’t on our side but we did it anyway. After hiking through fog and rain for four hours we finally reached the top of the mountain and had still no visibility. My whole body was shaking and freezing, and at the night it started to snow. An hour before sunrise my alarm rang but we were still caught by the whiteout. I opened the tent every ten minutes, hoping that we would see something, and then I witnessed one of the most amazing sunrises. I reached for my frozen boots and woke everybody up. We were rewarded with an incredible view over the clouds. Everybody screamed because of the joy we felt.
"Back home and while editing, I try to recreate and increase the light while keeping the image natural."
The same goes for the colors. So I am working a lot with gradients and radial filters. I start with one of my presets where I have some basic adjustments saved like noise reduction, sharpening, colors, etc. Then I adjust the exposure, shadows, and highlights because I tend to shoot a little bit darker to save the highlights. I use radial filters to enhance the fog and the lights a little bit more, and after that, I straighten the image.
For me to be happy with the result the colors have to be homogenous and the photo has to have a natural feel. There shouldn’t be something that is distracting and I want to create an atmosphere that soaks the viewer into the photograph. There’s no precise manner to assess whether a photo is ready or not, it’s more a feeling. When I’m thinking, yeah that’s how I felt and I don’t want to change anything – That’s when I consider a photo as finished. However, editing an image can take me sometimes 15 minutes, three months, or in the extreme 3 years because I can be very picky in this matter.
Success for me is when I’m happy with my work and that is something I’m really struggling with – because often I’m my biggest critic. It is very tempting to criticize negatively, thinking that I‘m not good enough, that everything that I do follows a repetitive pattern, etc. For me, it’s quite difficult to handle that because at which point is it a style, and at which point do you start repeating yourself and stop being creative/innovative? Where are the boundaries? If somebody knows you can hit me up!
On the other hand, I try to teach myself to also criticize myself constructively and see the positive side of things. When I recognize I’m in the negative thinking cycle, I try to remember that photography brought me so much. Friendships, laughter, and a lot of good stories to tell! And I will remind myself that photography made me who I am now and that my past self would be really proud of me.
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